BPH Energy continues to advance ‘turquoise’ hydrogen development plans

BPH Energy (ASX: BPH) believes it is on the right track to be able to produce “turquoise” hydrogen for the global market.

Turquoise hydrogen is produced using a process called pyrolysis and has no CO2 emissions.

BPH began its hunt for an answer to developing turquoise hydrogen in 2022 when it reached an agreement to acquire an initial stake in US-based Clean Hydrogen Technologies with 35.8% investee Advent Energy as its partner in the purchase.

In October 2023, BPH, Advent and Clean Hydrogen entered into a loan conversion agreement whereby BPH and Advent each have an interest of 19.5% in the US firm.

No CO2 emissions

Clean Hydrogen is best known for developing and successfully testing its processing capabilities, which have successfully produced hydrogen with no CO2 emissions, achieving on average above 90% cracking efficiency (the percentage of hydrocarbons broken into solid carbon and hydrogen per hour).

The US firm has been using methane as its feedstock but now plans to instead use natural gas through the pyrolysis method to create this emission-free “turquoise” hydrogen.

BPH managing director David Breeze said the Clean Hydrogen solution is being built with flexibility to work downstream at heavy transport fuelling hubs currently in use in the USA, mid-stream at steel plants replacing coking coal and upstream where the natural gas is processed into hydrogen – a much higher energy source which can be piped for all uses including the production of electricity.

What this all means is that, unlike other solutions, the technology being developed through Clean Hydrogen’s method requires very little change to and has very little impact on existing infrastructures and supply chains.

Clean Hydrogen has produced hydrogen beyond lab scale tests and is now planning to move to commercial production in 2024.

Stage 1 completed

Clean Hydrogen completed stage 1 work in 2022/2023 on how to scale the catalyst production at a centre of excellence in India.

It has also scaled the reactor to one-third of the internal diameter of the full-scale commercial system reactors planned for use in stage 3.

The project is currently in the commercial study stage before moving to stage 3.

In this current stage, Clean Hydrogen plans to demonstrate the commercial viability of two products: turquoise hydrogen and solid carbon.

This will be performed using a reactor half the internal diameter of the Stage 3 reactor.

Clean Hydrogen will build an end-to-end process for separating out the hydrogen from the uncracked hydrocarbons and then compress it into hydrogen bottle storage.

Commercial prospects

At the same time, Clean Hydrogen will demonstrate the commercial viability of its products by selling a carbon product called carbon composite made from majority-based carbon nanotubes in combination with alumina and bottled hydrogen of 99%+ purity.

Clean Hydrogen’s stage 3 system is planned to have two reactors working together, with the final customer systems designed to have a network of several reactors working in concert.

Stage 3 is planned for completion in 2024.